Recently, Kim du Toit made a concise and fair point about paywalls. His argument, in short, is that restricting access limits reach, and that reach matters. Especially for persuasion, ideas spread best when they move freely. That observation is impossible to dispute, and it reflects a real tradeoff faced by anyone publishing online today.
Reading it got me thinking.
We moderns have grown accustomed to free or nearly free content. That expectation did not arise by accident. For much of the twentieth century, independent newspapers were heavily and sometimes entirely subsidized by advertising. Broadcast television worked the same way. Viewers paid nothing because advertisers paid everything, and the arrangement held together long enough to feel normal.
The internet amplified this expectation. As content moved online, free access became the default. Sometimes it was ad-supported, sometimes subsidized by venture capital, sometimes treated as a loss leader. For a time, this reinforced the belief that writing and reporting could exist indefinitely without readers paying directly for it.
But that was never the historical norm.
For most of human history, writers did not live on advertising at all. They lived on patronage, subscription, and commission. Someone who valued the work paid for it directly, because that was the only way the work could continue.
This pattern is ancient.
In classical Athens, dramatic festivals were funded through choregia, a system in which wealthy citizens sponsored playwrights and productions as a civic duty. Without it, we would not have the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides. These were not leisure projects. They were demanding works made possible because someone paid for the labor.
The same logic carried forward.
- Geoffrey Chaucer was supported by the English crown, serving under Edward III and later Richard II in official posts that provided income and protection.
- Samuel Johnson, poor and chronically ill, relied on subscriptions and patrons, including Lord Chesterfield, to complete his Dictionary of the English Language.
- Alexander Hamilton, an orphan from the Caribbean, entered public life because patrons such as Thomas Stevens and Nicholas Cruger funded his education, while George Washington later elevated his work to national prominence.
This matters because it is often misunderstood.
The alternative to patronage was not equality. It was silence for everyone except wealthy elites with enough spare time and resources to write without pay. Without patrons, we would have lost extraordinary talents drawn from ordinary classes. Patronage did not entrench elitism. It bypassed it.
From elite patronage to public patronage
By the nineteenth century, this model evolved, not because writers no longer needed support, but because the pool of patrons expanded.
Mark Twain relied not on a duke or a court, but on advance subscriptions, publishing contracts, and lecture tours paid for by a public growing in literacy, curiosity, and means. Readers themselves became patrons.
Twain understood this clearly. Writing was his profession. The public paid because it wanted the work to exist. Patronage had become distributed.
Later, in the age of mass media, advertisers replaced traditional patrons. Businesses exchanged capital for visibility, underwriting newspapers and broadcasts in return for access to large audiences. For a time, this worked remarkably well, subsidizing an unprecedented expansion of public discourse. It was not cynical. It was simply another way of paying for attention.
The modern inversion
Today, the situation has quietly reversed. The structures that once expanded access to voices outside established elites increasingly favor elites who already possess visibility, resources, and institutional protection.
The reason is economic.
In the print and broadcast era, advertising was blunt. Advertisers paid for reach. Targeting was crude. Distribution was scarce. Publishers could command rates high enough to support professional writers.
The internet dismantled those conditions. Advertisers now pay for precision, not reach. With digital analytics and flawless tracking, they know who and how many are viewing a website, and they expect to pay for precisely that much, no more. At the same time, digital publishing exploded the supply of content in which to advertise. Scarcity vanished. Prices collapsed.
The result is simple math. Even large audiences no longer generate enough advertising revenue to pay writers decently without flooding pages with intrusive ads or chasing mass-appeal content, the strategy behind Buzzfeed and other clickbait sites. Serious writing – long-form reporting, careful analysis, unfashionable ideas – performs poorly under those incentives.
This is not a conspiracy or a moral failure. It is a change in incentives.
Faced with it, outlets had three options: slash quality, subordinate judgment of the content they create to advertisers and algorithms, or ask readers to shoulder part of the cost directly. Many chose the third. Paywalls emerged not as a first choice, but as the only way to preserve independence and solvency.
It’s worth noting that this does not mean everything disappears behind a wall. At PJ Media, roughly three-quarters of published content remains freely accessible. Paywalls are used selectively, not as a blunt instrument but rather to sustain the most labor-intensive work without placing the entire burden on advertising or ideology-driven funding.
Why readers now matter more than ever
Seen this way, paywalls are not barriers. They are a return to a sturdier model: patronage distributed across thousands of readers rather than concentrated in a few hands.
A publication sustained by thousands of subscribing readers is not a gated community. It is a civic achievement. Those readers are not merely consumers. They are stewards of a literate culture, making it possible for serious writing to exist in a world that no longer rewards it by default.
For most of history, great work survived because someone decided it was worth paying for. Today, that decision no longer belongs to kings, courts, or advertisers. It belongs to readers willing to say that words matter, labor matters, and ideas are worth sustaining.
That is not elitism. It is how a literate civilization keeps itself alive and free.
Editor’s Note: Happy New Year from all of us at PJ Media! You can support our work with a special holiday discount this year. Join PJ Media VIP and use the promo code MERRY74 to receive 74% off your membership.
